Dragon Age - Preview @ RPS
 

Oh, boy. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an E3 preview of Dragon Age with some withering observations. It's full of caveats like "I’ve seen minutes of it. It’s hard to have a sense of perspective […]" - but John Walker wasn't impressed with the material presented:
More information.

I'm starting to think this thing could have a quite a bit of camp appeal. David Gaider as Ed Wood of computer games?

David posted in our forum that the interaction between characters is similar to BG 2, and that it's possible only the end of a long line of interactions has been shown at the E3.

Are you guys about convinced that buying into the hype might have been overly optimistic?

Maybe songs of praise and promises from the developers themselves don't equate to set-in-stone truth?

Just a thought.

Well, this game has been in development longer than any previous BioWare title, and since I've yet to play a bad BW game, I consider it highly unlikely that Dragon Age won't satisfy me. It might not be the "spiritual successor to BG2", but it's most likely going to be head and shoulders above most RPGs.

Like Blizzard, I just can't imagine BioWare releasing a game the developers is not satisfied with.

That being said, I do think their marketing campaign has been something of a failure. Too many random tidbits and too much focus on stuff that is generally irrelevant. Where the developers used to discuss tactical combat, dialogue options, consequences, origins (the different classes having a different intro) and so on, it's now just rubbish all over the place.

Walp, IMO the interaction between characters in BG2 was just this side of camp as well (and, with Viconia anyway, sometimes crossed that line). DA looks like it's gone well past it.

I'm looking forward to it. Nothing's quite as good as campy camp that's unintentionally camp. (Hell, I've gathered that even the sex scene took place in a camp!)

Oh, I'm not suggesting it will be a bad game - at least not in any objective sense.

I'm merely suggesting the game MIGHT not be ANYWHERE near what so many people - including many from this forum - thought it HAD to be, especially considering we had developers promising a very deep and rich experience, much like BG/BG2.

I'm not really sure campy juvenile sex scenes coupled with Marilyn Manson marketing is what you'd expect from a "modern" mature CRPG.

As much as I don't like Marilyn Manson (they stole the main act this year for the Graspop festival! Assholes!), I never really "buy into" any hype. I mean, hype is simply informational to me, I guess. Screenshots and listed features coupled with multiple previews are usually enough for me to form an honest opinion of it. Sure, there's gushing and excitement, but I never really seem to be all that excited myself before any game release anymore.

Oh, except for Gothic 3. That was a disappointment on release. :p My fault really, for thinking it'd be like Gothic 1+2, but EVAN BETTAR!!!!1

I don't care what previews or hype say about a game -- positive or negative. In this case Bioware has the best track record for me by far of any game developer in making games I enjoy so unless they come out with a game which is completely not a genre I care about or unless they turnover all of their staff to new employees I will likely immensely enjoy every game they create including Dragon Age.

In other words, I think that you are too much influenced by the hype in a reverse way.

Or he's not that sold on BioWare?

For me, personally, Jade Empire was just ok, and Mass Effect was boring tripe. Dragon Age looks somewhere in between, but really banal and asinine in content.

Might just be the ridiculously bad marketing campaign, tho'.

I liked JE. It was good, clean, light-hearted fun, with a consistent and rather stylish graphic look, a story that maintained its tension and had a pretty nice twist, and solid gameplay.

Of course, it *was* more action-adventure than cRPG, but that's a characteristic, not a fault IMO.

As for ME, IMO the last quarter was pretty good; the rest could be uncharitably described as boring tripe.

All of a sudden Dragon Age went from sounding good to sounding like some kind of a bad joke. Which definitely can't be what Bioware had in mind when it planned for E3.

Who goofed, I wonder? Who's the object of disgust over at Bioware at the moment? Is the development team irritated with the marketing team or is it the other way around, and the marketing side is just making the best of what it's been given to promote?

Has this really been in development for ten years like the article says? I didn't know that. Who works on a project for ten years? To me that's a red flag right there.

I'm hoping we're just seeing the worst of things.

Bioware *can* do relationships better than this - I thought Ashley in Mass Effect was brilliant. Liara wasn't bad until near the end, but up to that point it was okay. But I agree with the general sentiment that unless they're done really well sex scenes just ought not to be there - sometimes what's not seen is far sexier.

I couldn't stand Ashley and took great pleasure in nuking her, so I guess I missed that part. I hope DA at least allows those kinds of options too.

I'm probably one of the least "media and marketing" influenced people you'll find altogether - and my opinion stems primarily from the downward spiral of Bioware since KotOR and the industry in general.

The marketing is just confirming my already very bleak expectations - I just figured it might shed some light on where this game is going, but if you really enjoy the direction Bioware has been heading for years - then there's no good reason not to expect another example of that.

It sounds too me like Mike Laidlaw (that presented the game) forgot to tell the people who watched his presentation of DA: Origins at E3 that the outcome they're about to witness is just one of several possible outcome…

And maybe a difference about how to market DA: Origins is the real reason Dan Tudge left….

Yeah my gut tells me that this was a marketing flub, not a design flaw. I'm no modern BioWare fanboy - I think Jade Empire onwards were fun but not great - but this smacks at jumping to conclusions and taking things out of context all at once. I'm not worried.

I agree it's mostly a marketing issue but, boy, what a cock-up. I think marketing thought they might get the Mass-Effect-blue-lesbian-alien blanket media coverage but they've misjudged it and presented it poorly. It still feels just a little desperate to me - like marketing doesn't trust the gameplay enough to go with that.

That said, it's surprising to see RPS criticising the actual dialogue and voiceacting; while marketing might not have the context right to show these to best affect, you still shouldn't get a decent writer like John Walker scribbling "awful", "clodding dialogue" and "pathetic".

Players see it, too. I've seen negative comments about the videos on a number of forums that run counter to the general, underlying "BioWare rocks" mantra. They've missed the mark with the material they've presented so far.

One thing I got from Gaider's posting was that he had nothing to do with what was shown at E3, so my guess is their moronic marketing minions decided to appeal to the infantile minds they assumed would buy the game. They should all get a bullet!!

No, I rarely do when it comes to marketing. That's a whole other bunch of people.

Insofar as the RPS article goes, I'll admit I find it a bit distressing to read this sort of stuff. It is what it is, but I don't think it's indicative of the game as a whole-- something even the writer pointed out, considering the game is so large and what we can show at any given time being such a small slice.

I don't know what the presentation itself looked like, but it probably needed to be stressed more that this was a story element shown out of context (whether or not that is a good idea to do being an entirely different discussion). Prior to getting to that point, the player would have had to spend a lot of time developing the romances for both Morrigan and Leliana-- and I'll stress that, myself: Morrigan does not sleep with you just because you gave her a book. The book is a quest item that, in this case, happened to push her approval into the point where she would make a sexual advance in camp.

It should also be pointed out that Leliana isn't reacting to the fact that you slept with Morrigan. She doesn't, in fact, even know that's what you did. She's responding to the fact that your romance with Morrigan has reached a point where she objects. It sounds like the writer of the article expected her to be more angry, and perhaps that's where the comments on the acting comes from, I don't know. It's too bad -- Leliana is, in my opinion, one of the better voices of the game. Perhaps the French accent threw him off? I'm not sure. Chances are he wasn't inclined to be charitable by that point.

Even so, I can't really blame some of the perceptions of these events if this is the order in which they were shown. Personally showing the latter part of a romance plot isn't likely to be of much interest to anyone who hasn't bought into it already and been through all the lead up. Maybe I'm wrong. Either way, the romances are pretty complex and it's a mistake to write them off as superficial -- for the people who like romance plots, they'll be in for a treat.

And it seems like we have a task ahead of us showing that this is so. I hope we can. I still believe this is a game worth the time of the RPG fan, very much so.

David, I really sympathise with you and your team at the reactions you're getting based on what your marketing division has chosen to do. They have TOTALLY blown it and I just hope someone in authority there is able to right the sinking ship. This has been my number one planned purchase for a long time and I'll certainly have my hand up to write the review for it here at the Watch. I still trust Bioware to deliver a great game, so please don't let me down!! :)

I can't speak for what marketing will or won't do, and I won't knock them because their job is a hard one -- but fortunately we still have a number of months left to go, yet. In the end, I feel confident that the reviews by people who actually play the game will sell it far better than any trailer or guided preview or what-not. Hopefully you will eventually see for yourself that we haven't let you down. :)

I really don't think Bio needs to worry just yet.

They'll sell on name alone, though I'd be surprised if this becomes a true blockbuster.

That said, I don't personally mind romantic plots, even if they're a bit juvenile and silly. That's always been the case in games, if they went there - or at least for the most part.

Marketing is just as irrelevant to me, except that it really DOES confirm everything I expect from the game.

My personal doubt is based on the direction they've been heading for a long time, coupled with the inescapable realities of the business by now. There's just no way they'd release a game on console and PC with this level of marketing and AAA production values, WITHOUT catering to the masses with simplified mechanics and trivial challenges.

That's just the way the industry works, and that's why I can't buy into the hype - because it doesn't make sense.

They can argue that the game is deep and complex until they're blue in the face, but I just can't believe it.

Yep. Mature mainstream rpg is basically an oxymoron.

I sure don't have the blind faith in Bioware that some people have, but I had high hopes for Dragon Age. Had, past tense. The marketing of DA has been so bad, that it has dropped the game from my 'must buy' list to the 'wait and see' category.

And this is why I dont base my game purchases on previews:D

I count on Bioware to produce a solid game as they usually do. My main concern is whether the thief NPCs will be bearable. I really hate 13-yearold girls being the main thief NPC…

Aye, I have to admit Mission in KotOR is not all that great. She's got a few good comments, but compared to the likes of Jolee Bindo, she's hardly worth having a conversation with. Jolee is one of my all-time favourite NPCs (loads of great dialogue), so I hope we'll see more characters like him.

Apart from KOTOR, where did BW have a 13-year-old girl thief NPC?

(FWIW, I thought Mission was one of the better-written and more interesting characters in that game. Between her and HK-47 I could even put up with Carth and Bastila.)

EDIT: It's by no means a pure Bioware problem, it's just that I have a fairly hard time coming up with thief NPCs that I like in recent-ish RPGs where everyone besides the main character is handed to you by the game. I'd widen the stereotype to "little sister" rather than just 13-yearolds.

Mission, Imoen (but in the BGs you at least had other thieves to choose between, Nalia (a slightly older teenager who discovered the joys of utopian communism), and she wasnt all that kiddish in BG2), Neeshka… I'm aware Bioware isnt to blame for all of them, but I'd like to kill them all in the most violent manner possible.:D

Imoen certainly wasn't the ideal thief NPC ;)

This whole rewamped "marketing for consoles" has been pretty crap. Why couldn't they have targeted it as a traditional rpg? Instead you get the impression that it's a adhd version of The Witcher.

How much you wi lling to bet that it won't be a block buster? I willing to take a bet that it does.

They sure don't. As video games continue to become more and more of a widely consumed media, it's to be expected that the relationship between quality and sales fades away to nothing. Just because a movie is a piece of crap that gets a 30% on Metacritic doesn't mean it won't open in the top box office slot, and just because a movie is a masterpiece on every critic's must-see list doesn't mean it will even break even. I'd say we're about at that point with AAA video games. The reaction from devoted CRPGers matters to the people who work on the game, of that I'm sure. But sales are going to be primarily driven by marketing that happens outside our little community of people who read sites like this. If only we mattered more, what a beautiful world it would be.

I've read some previews of DA:O including the one from RPS. I think it's hard to actually write a useful preview for such a complex RPG game like DA:O just from seeing small parts of the game. You need to play for several hours before you learn enough about the story, game play, character development to make a good assessment of whether the game is good or bad.

So the preview from RPS sounded like sour grapes to me. The previewer made his comments based on some "snapshots" of a huge game and meant it was pathetic etc. It doesn't seem he had the time to build a character, solve any quests and see how the game play was. I agree that jumping into a scene where Morrigan "jumps over" the PC probably isn't the best way to show a snapshot of DA:O. As David Gaider explained, we don't know what lead up to this scene.

I have a feeling Bioware looked at the success from the Witcher using a lot of adult content. So they added it in DA:O as well. You had small parts of it in Mass Effect and that was just fine with me. The Witcher was a bit too much I think and I still remember I had to play parts of the game late at night when my wife was asleep. :) So it wouldn't hurt if Bioware could tone done the sexual content of DA:O similar to how we can decide to tone down violence in games with a setting. If you keep the setting on then you get to see everything, but if you set it off then you just fade to black when the game shows the detailed sexual content.

It seems to me a lot of the DA:O criticism from E3 is about being exposed to sexual content without a chance to avoid it. I know that e. g. Europeans are more open minded than Americans when it comes to showing such stuff so the Witcher showed more sexual details in the European version than in the US version.

I don't mind seeing sexual scenes like in Mass Effect (it was rather toned down), but if it becomes too clear and direct then I would be a bit embarrassed playing. If I don't know when the scenes will happen then I would make sure I play when the rest of the family is asleep etc. and that doesn't feel right.

I can't comment yet about actor performance in DA:O, but it would have to be very bad before I would become upset. I'm not a native English speaking person so I would probably not hear the small nuisances between great acting and just good acting. Sometimes I've seen a game getting criticism for having actors with certain accents (like English or Australian). I don't mind at all if a dwarf is talking with an English accent while the other dwarf is talking with a US accent. I don't mind about that at all.

What's more important to me is that the actors are engaged and have some feelings when they act. If they just act like they're reading text from a paper without any connection to the game story then it will become poor. But most acting in RPG games are good enough for me. E. .g I felt the acting in Mass Effect was just fine.

So I will definitely buy DA:O because the story so far seems good and despite some apparent flaws in game mechanics (a bit clunky combat etc.) I believe the game will be good. I can't understand people reading a preview from ONE guy and then make a conclusion based on what he wrote. I would only worry about previews if many different previews independently of each other point at major flaws with a game. The it's not sour grapes from one previewer, but a real problem with the game. The last Alone in the Dark game was a game I wanted to buy, but decided not to because almost all previewers commented on the same type of problems. Then I knew the game wasn't as good as I hoped.

So I think we should wait for more DA:O previews to appear closer to release date before we conclude that this game will disappoint. I still have hopes the game will be as good as Mass Effect and Baldur's Gate.

I hope Bioware would listen and learn from feedback they get when they show a trailer or show the game at E3 etc. They still have time to fine tune details of the game. If e. g. the voice acting of a certain NPC was considered to be very poor it's time to replace this acting with another one unless it's one of the major characters.
The sex scene between Morrigan and the PC can be toned down if it's considered to be too direct. So I see shows like E3 like an opportunity for Bioware to try out certain parts of the game on the public and get feedback in time for them make some changes.

-ehm-

Any sex, romance or love scene in any Bioware game can be avoided; you just need to choose the right dialogue options. You can, of course, also tell Morrigan, or any other romantic interest, 'sorry, we're just going to be friends'.

Again, by choosing the right dialogue options….

Any Bioware game has alsways featured romances (ok, maybe not shattered steel) but any Bioware game from the first Baldur's Gate have had romantic interests that your PC can get involved during the course of the game.

DA: Origins is a Bioware game, thus it, of course, has romances that may or may not lead to a love or sex scene. And any love or sex scene can be avoided in a Bioware game…

"It can be avoided" seems like an overused cliché to me. I can never visit New Reno in Fallout 2, it doesn't mean the city is less of a setting-breaker.

It's good when things are optional, but you can't excuse badly done material just because they player doesn't have to see them.

I agree completely but would also point out that, if these games were made fundamentally differently, then stuff like this might not be a problem at all.

Right now CRPGs, like every other kind of application, are made and sold in only one iteration. So customers pay for "the whole enchilada" and would naturally prefer it all to be edible.

But if it worked like a smorgasbord instead, and customers knew they were only ever going to be served a limited amount of everything available, then "optional" content would make more sense. Or better still, if content were selected via indistinguishable collaboration, then the whole thing might become intriguing instead of something to be tolerated.

Thats one of my main problems with romances. The "optional" part.
I would like romances to have 2 well made paths atleast. One where you can go along with the romance and get your "reward" in the end and one where you can break up the romance and still end up with a reward of some sort.
It seems if you fail or break up most romances you just cut of some content without getting anything in return.

it needs to be taken as what it is - a brief clip that really means nothing in the overall scope of the game. Sure, first impressions can make a significant… well.. impression, but this is like reading one page of a book.

Buck up, rpg compadres. I have a feeling that everything's gonna work out just fine

That is exactly what I was thinking.